Pebble CEO Turns Back Clock

SAN FRANCISCO -- The night before Eric Migicovsky opened a door to what would become a $10 million windfall, he was sitting in his living room chatting with friends about how much his Kickstarter campaign might raise when it launched the next day. "The biggest prediction was $5,000," he said.

Today Migicovsky is chief executive of Pebble Technology with about 45 employees. The startup recently moved from his living room into a real office in Palo Alto, Calif.

The startup had its origins in 2008 when Migicovsky was in his final year at engineering school at the University of Waterloo. He was working on prototypes for a smart wallet and a smart watch.

His smart watch prototype used an Arduino board linked to a display torn out of an aging Nokia 3310, the classic candy bar cellphone. "I couldn't have predicted that five years later I would be running a smart watch company," he told a group of reporters at an event sponsored by Broadcom Corp.

Kickstarter rallied backers from 150 countries, 45% of them outside the US. They helped jettison Pebble into a real company with a real product instead of a prototype "held together by duct tape -- five years later there's much less duct tape," Migicovsky said.

"It's really exciting to see two or three people create a product that takes the industry by storm," said Henry Samueli, co-founder and chief technologist at Broadcom, introducing Migicovsky at the event.

There were smart watches before and after Pebble. But Migicovsky credits his startup with being unique in how it considered what consumers might want then observed what they did with its device "daily to make life better in small but meaningful ways," he said.

Creating custom watch faces as fashion statements or just for fun is one use. "The most popular Pebble app is a watch face where a monster eats the time every minute," he said.

Use of the watch as a remote control was one of the unexpected applications and one with lots of legs for the future.

Today Pebble is a Bluetooth platform to read text alerts and caller IDs from smartphones, control WiFi-enabled door locks and thermostats, and more. The company has a software developer's kit used by hackers and established companies, including Royal Philips Electronics who wrote an app to control its LED lights using the watch.

Another new app lets the watch control a GoPro camera. The watch also will become a window to wearable fitness devices.

"Our job is to connect to sensors and be the heads-up, hands-free display to other devices," he said.

Broadcom's Samueli said he thinks medical gadgets will become one of the biggest segments of the emerging market for wearable devices. "Once we build sophisticated enough sensors, health care will be one of the biggest areas -- with monitors for blood chemistry and brain waves you will have a new world of healthcare," he said.

Migicovsky wants to keep the smart watch simple. The company aims to limit the device to using small messages of just a few Bluetooth packets. That way it can maintain its promised battery life of about a week.

The watch does not use wireless charging yet, but the company has done "quite a lot of investigations" of competing standards. It uses a proprietary charging plug now in part to ensure the watch is waterproof and for better industrial design.

I think its a good idea to keep the smart watch as simple as possible, especially as it allows for the use of only a few Bluetooth packets, which is enough for about a week. Now if only they could get the device to charge wirelessly....s.

Sure, by definition every company is small at the start...but sometimes it takes very long time to grow in size and do what you are known for...Samsung for example was created in 1938 as a trading company and entered electronics in the sixties and dominated phone market just recently...this is 70 year long journey...Kris

If healthcare apps are on the table simplicity would seem to be impossible to retain. Security requirements and other medical standards would seem to be the issue unless the watch is just a gateway to a central medical 'server' in the home. Maybe thats the best way to go.

I'm thrilled that the Kickstarter campaign was so successful - and that the cost estimations for the device were correct. If a Kickstarter campaign is a loss leader market test or the materials costs are slightly off then such a "windfall" of orders could prove to be a success disaster. Well done.